As this doesnít really fall under the scope of General Audio, Iíve moved it to Polls; I thought that was a better compromise than General Music Discussion, seeing as topics within the last are not featured on the Portal by default. Is this relevant to a future listening test or something similar?

Edit:

QUOTE (ojdo @ Jul 16 2012, 03:56)

QUOTE (IgorC @ Jul 16 2012, 09:19)

Please, pick the genres which You listen mostly. An occasional listening of some particular genres doesn't count.

Please put this phrase into the question of the poll. I answered thoroughly just to be told that I should have answered a different question.

I guess my “occational” listening to a genre involves more hours than the average person's main interest. (At least as long as you don't count as “listening” the idiot box that is constantly switched on.)

Bitrate varies considerably per genre. The results of this poll can be useful for bitrate verifications during preparation/discussion of public tests as well as for developers (calibration of VBR modes, optimization of compression etc.)

Is that suggesting that developers should make accommodations (of what nature?) for particular genres, rather than remaining objective and fair by sticking with universal principles of psychoacoustics? If so, I'm not sure how to feel about that!

This assumes such tunings are even possible/worthwhile. The closest example I can think of is work to reduce SFB21 bloat, which may be more relevant to fans of genres that tend to be treble-heavy, but which seems to me to be ultimately an issuethat is more general and whose amelioration is beneficial across the board.

Is that suggesting that developers should make accommodations (of what nature?) for particular genres, rather than remaining objective and fair by sticking with universal principles of psychoacoustics? If so, I'm not sure how to feel about that!

Any audio codec has a "difficult" and "easy" genres to compress. The information about average collection (roughly speaking) helps to determine how much encoder can increase or decrease bitrate on some particular genres and still would hit desired bitrate on big variety of genres.

As for the discussion, it makes no sense to me that a compiler should even know what the genre is. What I can think of is that you make a couple of encoding pre-set that you think is right for certain genres. But VBR makes that not worthwhile either. I see it as a "Just for fun" poll, as occasionally I listen to all of the above.

On a side note, I admit I do tag my music files with one or more genre. On the other hand, I hate the strict categorization. Usually the music that doesn't obey the genre definitions but is on the (genre) edges, is the most interesting to me.

Electronic & Experimental: Goa Trance / Psytrance scene, including all fusions with ambient, breakbeat, DnB, 2-Step etc, and experimentation inside the scene (Australian scene, and Matsuri Productions label for example.) Oldskool Techno, Dub Techno, Acid Genres, Drill'n'Bass, Jungle / Darkstep, and experimentation in these fields as well. Some IDM, and Experimental Ambient and Soundscapes / Field Recordings as well (some of the releases, not the whole Genres). Some fusions of psychedelic Rock and Experimental Electronic, or Psy-Rock and Synthpop, or some Krautrock (Brainticket, Acid Mothers Temple and nick nicely are good examples.) A very little Post Industrial, Ritual-Industrial and other related to this scene. Any other thing that keeps it sofisticated, and push the boundaries of its host genre.

Israeli genres, or Israeli variants of the above, fusion or not, and some jewish religious / jewish kabbalistic as well. (Not foreign. But things local in Hebrew).

I checked the boxes "Rock (Rock, Metal, Punk etc)", "Classic", "Jazz", "Electronic" and "genres which are not listed here". At first I would also check most of the other boxes (exceptions are "Pop", "Hip-Hop, Rap" and "Gospel") but then I saw the request to only check boxes for styles that you regularly listen to.

Some things that I'm missing:

Baroque, Romantic and Modern. Usually these periods are swept under "Classical" but I'd like to mention them explicitly because I actually tend to avoid the strict Classical period (1730~1820 according to Wikipedia) with composers such as Mozart and Haydn. Then still I would say these periods make for very broad categories, since nearly all other available checkboxes in the poll are of the same period (1960+ or "Contemporary" if you want).

Dance Electro (with styles like House and Trance) OR Art Electro (with styles like IDM and Ambient Electronic). The poll doesn't distinguish between the two but I can't imagine that "Electronic" refers to both since they differ considerably.

There are other categories which I think are missing, such as "Soundtrack", "Old" (meaning pre-1600s) and "Atonal", but I won't start a list here because I don't listen to those very often myself.

To be honest I think the categories are chosen rather erratically, both from the musical content perspective and from the expected bitrate perspective. Some are highly specific, such as "Reggae", "Soul" and "Gospel", while others are sweeping broad, such as "Rock (Rock, Metal, Punk etc)", "Jazz", "Electronic" (whether that means arty or dancy Electronic) and "Latin". I don't mind having very specific categories, nor do I object against very broad ones, but having both at the same time makes things fuzzy (for example consider Rock music that at the same can also be Blues, Country or Reggae). Still other categories are basically meaningless: "Ethnic/World" (the only binding factor is that it isn't Western or Latin, which doesn't tell you anything about content or bitrate), "Experimental" (I wonder whether there's any common denominator in this category at all) and as far as I'm concerned also "Classic" (the only common factor being that it's either orchestral or composed between 1600 and 1940).

So I hope the poll will turn out to be truly useful, but I'm afraid it won't. Your goals seems a bit overly ambitious for a forum poll; if you pick specific categories there will be too many to list in the poll, while if you make the categories too broad it will be impossible to say anything accurate about the associated bitrate.

Rock, classical, kiiind of electronic music, i guess. Indie is often considered a genre, right?

Basically, i find trying to sort my music by genre to be a waste of time, since very few songs can actually be classified into a single genre.I instead tag my music with very literal tags. Studio, Live, Orchestral, Ambient and such. I very rarely want a mix of these categories in a single playlist.

Pretty much everything this side of early music. In general, to twee, too beardy, too lentils.

Oh, and Vivaldi brings back bad memories of correcting and organising the publisher's database of every single damned one of his several hundred Concerti. While the music's good (mostly), there are memories of double vision and swollen hands from all the typing. The choral repertoire was a piece of piss by comparison.

Mostly electronic ambient stuff here (Ishq being my fave, and my friend) but I love and listen regularly to many different genres and periods of music. Not a huge fan of jazz, classical or hip-hop although there is some I like a lot.